There's a brief moment in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy where the big red demon lifts up a giant manhole cover and scatters a couple hundred ugly, pitch-black CGI cockroaches. It's a completely gratuitious, let's-squick-the-audience move, at least for an entomophobe like me, but at the same time, it wouldn't be a del Toro movie without that moment -- the man loves his bugs. They appear in all of his movies -- the dragonfly-like faerie of Pan's Labyrinth, the all-too real roaches that pour out of the statue in Cronos (not to mention the Cronos Device itself, a mechanical scarab), and let's not forget the giant man-eating beetles with the endearingly-odd camouflage scheme in Mimic. (They disguise themselves as silhouettes of old men in hats and trenchcoats, which is about as inconspicuous as the name "Ford Prefect".) There's something otherworldly and abstract about bugs -- the triangular heads, the multi-jointed limbs, those creepy compound eyes -- and you see that same kind of abstract quality in the amazing creature designs that populate del Toro's films. You could almost make a drinking game out of it -- take a sip every time a monster has eyes somewhere other than the face. As much as del Toro's body of work is inscribed with the pleasures of pop, underneath beats the heart of a Surrealist.

It's not hard to root for the guy. He's clearly a geek -- the round torso, the beard, the glasses, they're all too familiar, if only because, for me, they're just a mirror away. But you can also see it in the kind of stories he tells -- Gothic in all senses of the word, full of forbidding, alien landscapes, and heroes who are marked by a deep longing they may or may not be able to assuage. But unlike the Germanic quality of, say, Tim Burton's films, del Toro brings a distinctive Latin American touch to his visuals -- a slight hint of magic realism. (It's not surprising that he counts Borges as an influence -- many of del Toro's strange vistas are reminiscent of the master's "The Library of Babel.") More importantly, del Toro's big theme, what runs through most of his pictures, is the struggle of the outsider in a harsh world. Often, those outsiders are literally monsters, like Hellboy or Blade, attempting to save a world that won't accept them, while other times they're powerless kids trying to survive and adapt in a hostile, adult arena. (Mimic seems to be the exception to all this -- however, since the human characters make absolutely no impression, perhaps the big bugs are supposed to be the heroes.) It's the perfect geek theme -- who among us hasn't felt like a misfit, finding solace in the dark and the weird?

But as much as I find myself in tune with del Toro's style and thematic interests, it pains me to admit that he hasn't lived up to his potential. You'd be forgiven if you thought he already had -- his 2006 feature Pan's Labyrinth was not only critically acclaimed, but also won three Academy Awards and was nominated for three more, including Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film. Yet -- and I know many who would strongly disagree with me -- I think the film is ultimately a failure. Del Toro has a big, broad-stroke, four-color sensibility, which serves him well when it comes to stilt-legged goat-men and vampire superheroes, but conventional reality isn't his strong suit. When Pan's Labyrinth focuses on the titular maze and the world beyond, it's terrific -- probably as imaginative as del Toro has ever been, sweetened by shout-outs to My Neighbor Totoro and The Shining. But when it aims for a kind of realism to contrast with the fanciful faerie world, it stumbles, looking like one of the hundreds of blandly-competent foreign films that Miramax flooded the market with in the early 90s. (Ironic, considering his troubles with that studio when making Mimic.) Making matters worse, the characters are all one-note -- within minutes of meeting them, you know exactly everything you need to know about them. (Which is, strangely, the opposite of his first film, Cronos -- the characters are broader, more cartoon-like, which paradoxically makes them deeper and more real.) The exception is the Faun, if only because his true intentions are kept sinisterly vague until the end, but even so, his mincingly theatrical, Cirque du Soleil-esque performance begins to grate after a while. The overall effect is a film made by someone obsessed with detail, but for whom emotions remain an intellectual concept.

That's why it's understandable that del Toro's best films to date are comic-book adaptations that are heavy on the rock 'em sock 'em -- action scenes are almost by definition abstract -- and lighter on the character stuff. Blade II is probably my favorite -- it has nothing more on its mind that just how badass Blade is -- but the first Hellboy isn't anything to sneeze at, either. It has its problems -- a bit lopsided, structurally (it stops dead whenever Hellboy's feelings for Liz come up), and often feels less like a movie than someone's X-Files/superhero roleplaying game mashup where none of the players talked to each other before making characters. ("I wanna play a demon who's really a good guy but with a big stone hand!" "I wanna play a troubled pyrokinetic!" "I wanna be a fish guy who's really smart but contributes zilch to combat!") But it's a gratifyingly weird action movie, a sort of H.P. Lovecraft's Commando. It's the kind of movie where Ron Perlman, under a metric ton of makeup (not an unusual happenstance for that actor, admittedly) can give a fine cigar-chomping performance as a demon, but the most memorable parts are the things that are just taken for granted -- like a talisman that reanimates corpses for interrogation purposes. It's never explained, and thank God for that.

The follow-up, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, should've been a home run, a chance for the director to bring it all home. And on the visual front, he does. Given the biggest budget of his career, del Toro goes wild, giving us a pre-credits animated sequence that evokes the Brothers Quay, a magical underground world that's part Mos Eisley cantina and part Diagon Alley, and more bizarre creatures than the rest of his filmography combined. (One character actually has a friggin' castle for a head, and another is made of gas. Talk about abstract.) The antagonist, Prince Nuada (a terrific Luke Goss, formerly of the boy band Bros. -- take that, Take That), is less a villain and more of a misguided knight, making for an interesting contrast with the should-be-evil-but-isn't Hellboy. The black and white of the first movie is replaced with many shades of grey, which is kind of a first for the director. In fact, the whole thing is pretty ambitious, actually. Del Toro is trying to up the emotional ante of his filmmaking, by exploring, in the midst of fighting a magic robot army, the idea of love as sacrifice: the ill-fated romance between fishman Abe and a princess; Hellboy giving up peace and anonymity to save a world that won't accept him; and Liz, ironically enough, potentially turning the Earth into a burnt offering to save her Big Red. All the elements are there for a wonderful follow-up to an interesting if flawed film.

But it never gels. Amongst this stuffed pizza of plot, Hellboy also has to learn to put away childish things in order to become a Hellman. Unfortunately, del Toro can't quite do the same -- it's almost like he doesn't trust himself, so he falls back on goofy humor to fill in the cracks. Nothing wrong with that, except del Toro's never been particularly funny. So we get an embarrassingly bad scene where Hellboy and Abe get drunk on Tecate and sing along with Barry Manilow, as well as a tiring, quién es mas macho? confrontation with Johann Kraus, the aforementioned gas man. More irritatingly, the movie continues the emasculation of the series' one interesting human character, Jeffrey Tambor's Agent Manning. I suppose that's thematically appropriate -- by the end, del Toro's creations have pretty much turned their back on humanity -- but the narrative tactics used to impart that (essentially, turning Manning into the uptight white version of Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element), well, stink. Every time the story asks the storyteller to rise to the occasion, the storyteller responds with schtick.

Despite my continuing disappointment with del Toro's films, I know that one of these days he's going to get the right material at the right time and it's all going to snap into place. In the meantime, del Toro could learn a lot from the director he most resembles both physically and temperamentally: Peter Jackson. Jackson also has a predilection for fantastic creatures, giant setpieces, and crazy action. He can also infuse all this with the kind of big, genuine emotion that has eluded del Toro so far. (In a strange inverse of del Toro, Jackson's best film is the small one, Heavenly Creatures.) He may get the chance -- del Toro's been tapped to direct The Hobbit under the auspices of Jackson. It's a straightforward story, such a clean and simple emotional arc, with nothing remotely abstract about it. Maybe it'll be just the thing. I mean, hell, it's got giant spiders.